The less a thing is known, the more fervently it is believed.
- Montaigne

In effect a new religion has grown out of secular humanism. Global warming is the central tenet of this new belief system in much the same way that the Resurrection is the central tenet of Christianity. Al Gore has taken a role corresponding to that of St Paul in proselytising the new faith.

There are major differences, however. Whereas it is not possible to call oneself a Christian without entertaining the central belief in the Resurrection, it is certainly possible to be deeply concerned with the order and condition of humanity and so call oneself a humanist without entertaining a corresponding belief in anthropogenic global warming (AGW). Belief in a Resurrection which supposedly occurred some 2000 years ago is a matter of personal faith, whereas AGW is a scientific hypothesis which can and should be tested by observation. Imagine the consequences both to science and to secular humanism should this hypothesis turn out to be untrue and the dire predictions of the climate models fail to materialise.

The quasi-religious nature of AGW is evidenced by the rancour which is generated when people like me express scepticism about the theory. Scepticism is an essential part of science which has, until recently, been a “small-l liberal” pursuit in which the opinions of doubters were respected. Now we sceptics are called “deniers” and, by implication, lumped in with neo-Nazis who question the Holocaust. The accusation that we are somehow in the sway of the oil companies and similar big business interests is commonplace and indeed is the chief argument of non-scientist supporters of the AGW theory. This echoes the “work of the Devil” argument of fundamentalist Christians; it is a mental trick by which the faithful avoid facing the real issues.

Why then do a majority of scientists support the theory? I believe it is largely a matter of loyalty. Very few of us physicists know enough genetics to justify our belief in Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection but most of us support it because we believe it to be the outcome of rigorous scientific processes similar to those carried out in our own discipline. Most scientists would support the AGW theory for much the same reason.

By accident of history I find myself in the opposing camp. I was trained as a physicist and was granted a PhD for my postgraduate work in upper atmosphere physics. In the early 1980s I joined the CSIRO’s Division of Oceanography and worked in surface gravity waves (ocean waves) for a time. Much of the theoretical side of oceanography entails fluid dynamics which, because of its heavy mathematical load, is regarded as a sub-discipline of applied mathematics rather than of physics. Because of this, in my view, many practitioners of oceanography and climatology have a cavalier disregard for experimental testing and an unjustified faith in the validity of large-scale computer models.

Later in my career I was involved in running and refining numerical fluid dynamical models, so I gained some insight into how this modelling is done and how rigorously such models need to be tested. Naval architects and aerodynamical engineers do such testing in wave tanks and wind tunnels.

Meteorologists regularly test model “skill”. Climatologists don’t seem to have a concept of testing, and prefer to use the term “verification” instead - that is, they do not seek to invalidate their models; they only seek supporting evidence. My scepticism about AGW arises from the fact that as a physicist who has worked in closely related areas, I know how poor the underlying science is. In effect the scientific method has been abandoned in this field.

Back in the early 1990s when I was still working for the CSIRO and the early versions of the AGW theory started to gain currency, I was rather bemused by the passions which were aroused in my colleagues and the gullibility with which predictions of future climate disaster were accepted. Surely the jury is still out, I thought. I remained agnostic about the theory. More recently, after reading the literature and looking in detail at the output of one well-known climate model (HadCM3) I have changed my stand. I now believe it is nonsense for the following reasons.

First there is the argument, commonly used by Al Gore and others, that carbon dioxide forms a layer like a blanket or greenhouse window pane high in the atmosphere which traps long-wave infra-red radiation, thus making the surface of the earth warmer. This is misleading. Certainly carbon dioxide is an infra-red absorber but, like most infra-red absorbing gases, its absorption rate depends on concentration and pressure and is at a maximum at the ground. The atmosphere is a gas, not a solid, and bits of it move up and down, carrying heat as they move. As a meteorological balloon climbs higher in the atmosphere, the measured temperature falls off with increasing height. This phenomenon, referred to as the lapse rate, has been known and described for more than a century. The lapse rate is determined by the thermodynamic properties of the gases that make up the atmosphere and has little to do with radiation. The convection term completely dominates the radiation term in the relevant equation.

Second there are the climate models themselves. In discussions with colleagues, arguments always seem to come down to “But the models show...” Those who use this argument seldom have modelling experience themselves and share the lay public's naive faith in the value of large computer models.

I have been a fluid dynamical modeller and I know how flaky numerical models can be for even a relatively small chunk of fluid like the Derwent Estuary. The models are highly unstable and need to be carefully cosseted in order to perform at all realistically. One reason for their inherent instability is that the mesh size of the model grid (typically hundreds of metres to hundreds of kilometres) is always much larger than the scale at which friction and molecular diffusion operate (millimetres or less). These are the forces which act to damp down oscillations by converting free energy to heat. In order to get around this difficulty, in order to keep a model stable, it is common practice to set certain parameters such as eddy viscosity unrealistically high to compensate for the absence of molecular friction. This is reasonable if we are using the model to gain insight into underlying processes, but it means that fluid dynamic models are not much good at predicting the future. There is no exact correspondence between model and reality, and the two soon part company. Fluid mechanics and celestial mechanics are very different disciplines.

This country and the world at large have many real political, demographic and environmental issues to contend with. We do not need to create problems where none exist. The present hysteria diverts money and attention away from problems which do need to be solved. In my view, terrorism, the proliferation of nuclear weapons and pandemic disease are far bigger threats to my family's comfort and security than are global warming and putative “tipping points”.

There is a danger that conservation failures will be blamed on “climate change”. This happened recently when the removal of feral cats caused a rabbit population explosion on Macquarie Island. Incompetent environmental management resulted in such massive erosion problems that eleven species of birds are now threatened. Climate change has provided a convenient alternative view of the cause of this disaster. Likewise the flooding of oceanic islands by “rising sea levels” has more to do with the removal of coral reefs for construction projects than with global warming.

Over the last few years, with remarkable rapidity, AGW theory has gone from a scientific curiosity to a politically-correct catechism. Nowadays it is not merely politically correct, it is politically essential. Somehow this nineteenth-century oddity has outlasted Das Kapital to become the banner of millions of environmentally concerned Westerners. It seems to fulfil a human need for sacrifice, a need to “put something back”. It is the ancient myth about guilt and sin and redemption in a new guise.

People are entitled to entertain whatever apocalyptic view of the future they choose, but such ideas have nothing to do with science. Climate prediction is not science, it is pseudo-science, and sooner or later more real scientists are going to wake up to this fact.

In the conduct of human affairs it is surely preferable that we base our actions on reason and evidence rather than on piety and myth.

To create “hockey stick” reconstructions out of nothing, I’m going to do this:

1.Generate roughly 148 years worth of monthly “tree – ring” data using rand() in EXCEL. This corresponds to 1850-1998. I will impose autocorrelation with r=0.995. I’ll repeat this 154 times. (This number is chosen arbitrarily.) On the one hand, we know these functions don’t correlate with Hadley because they are synthetically generated. However, we are going to pretend we believe “some” are sensitive to temperature and see what sort of reconstruction we get.
2.To screen out the series that prove themselves insensitive to temperature, I’ll compute the autocorrelation, R, between Hadley monthly temperature data and the tree-ring data for each of the 154 series. To show this problem with this method, I will compute the correlation only over the years from 1960-1998. Then, I’ll keep all series that have autocorrelations with absolute values greater than 1.2* the standard deviation of the 154 autocorrelations R. I’ll assume the other randomly generated monthly series are “not sensitive” to temperature and ignore them. (Note: The series with negative values of R are the equivalent of “upside down” proxies. )
3.I’ll create a proxy by simply averaging over the “proxies” that passed the test just described. I’ll rebaseline so the average temperature and trends for the proxie and Hadley match between 1960-1998.
4.I’ll plot the average from the proxies and compare it to Hadley
The comparison from one (typical) case is shown below. The blue curve indicates is the “proxy reconstruction”; the yellow is the Hadley data (all data are 12-month smoothed.)

Notice that after 1960, the blue curve based on the average of “noise” that passed the test mimics the yellow observations. It looks good because I screened out all the noise that was “not sensitive to temperature”. (In reality, none is sensitive to temperature. I just picked the series that didn’t happen to fail. )

Because the “proxies” really are not sensitive to temperature, you will notice there is no correspondence between the blue “proxy reconstruction” and the yellow Hadley data prior to 1960. I could do this exercise a bajillion times and I’ll always get the same result. After 1960, there are always some “proxies” that by random chance correlate well with Hadley. If I throw away the other “proxies” and average over the “sensitive” ones, the series looks like Hadley after 1960. But before 1960? No dice.

Also notice that when I do this, the “blue proxie reconstruction” prior to 1960 is quite smooth. In fact, because the proxies are not sensitive, the past history prior to the “calibration” period looks unchanging. If the current period has an uptick, applying this method to red noise will make the current uptick look “unprecedented”. (The same would happen if the current period had a down turn, except we’d have unprecedented cooling. )

The red curve
Are you wondering what the red curve is? Well, after screening once, I screened again. This time, I looked at all the proxies making up the “blue” curve, and checked whether they correlated with Hadely during the periods from 1900-1960. If they did not, I threw them away. Then I averaged to get the red line. (I did not rebaseline again.)

The purpose of the second step is to “confirm” the temperature dependence.

Having done this, I get a curve that sort of looks sort of like Hadley from 1900-1960. That is: the wiggles sort of match. The “red proxy reconstructions” looks very much like Hadley after 1960: both the “wiggles” and the “absolute values” match. It’s also “noisier” than the blue curve–that’s because it contains fewer “proxies”.

But notice that aprior to 1900, the wiggles in the red proxy and the yellow hadley data don’t match. (Also, the red proxie wants to “revert to the mean.”)

Unquestionably, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was formed to build the scientific case for humanity being the primary cause of global warming. Such a goal is fundamentally unscientific, as it is hostile to alternative hypotheses for the causes of climate change.

The most glaring example of this bias has been the lack of interest on the IPCC’s part in figuring out to what extent climate change is simply the result of natural, internal cycles in the climate system. In Chapter 9 of the latest (4th) IPCC report, entitled “Understanding and Attributing Climate Change”, you would think the issue of external versus internal forcing would be thoroughly addressed. But you would be wrong.

The IPCC is totally obsessed with external forcing, that is, energy imbalances imposed upon the climate system that are NOT the result of the natural, internal workings of the system. For instance, a search through Chapter 9 for the phrase “external forcing” yields a total of 91 uses of that term. A search for the phrase “internal forcing” yields…(wait for it)…zero uses. Can we really believe that the IPCC has ruled out natural sources of global warming when such a glaring blind spot exists?

Admittedly, we really do not understand internal sources of climate change. Weather AND climate involves chaotic processes, most of which we may never understand, let alone predict. While chaos in weather is exhibited on time scales of days to weeks, chaotic changes in the ocean circulation could have time scales as long as hundreds of years, and we know that cloud formation – providing the Earth’s natural sun shade – is strongly influenced by the ocean.

Thus, small changes in ocean circulation can lead to small changes in the Earth’s albedo (how much sunlight is reflected back to space), which in turn can lead to global warming or cooling. The IPCC’s view (which is never explicitly stated) that such changes in the climate system do not occur is little more than faith on their part.

The IPCC’s pundits like to claim that the published evidence for humanity causing warming greatly outweighs any published evidence against it. This appeal to majority opinion on their part is pretty selective, though. They had no trouble discarding hundreds of research papers supporting evidence for the Medieval Warm Period or the Little Ice Age when they so uncritically embraced the infamous “Hockey Stick” reconstructions of past temperature change.

Despite a wide variety of previous temperature proxies gathered from around the world (see figure below) that so clearly showed that centuries with global warming and cooling are the rule, not the exception, the Hockey Stick was mostly based upon some cherry-picked tree rings combined with the assumption that significant warming is a uniquely modern phenomenon.

As such, they rejected the prevailing “scientific consensus” in favor of a minority view that supported their desired outcome. I suspect that they do not even recognize their own hypocrisy.

As I have discussed before, the IPCC’s neglect of natural variability in the climate system ends up leading to circular reasoning on their part. They ignore the effect of natural cloud variations when trying to diagnose feedback, which then leads to overestimates of climate sensitivity. This, in turn, causes them to conclude that increasing carbon dioxide concentrations alone are sufficient to explain global warming, and so no natural forcings of climate change need be found.

But all they have done is reasoned themselves in a circle. By ignoring natural variability, they can end up claiming that natural variability does not exist. Admittedly, their position is internally consistent. But then, so is all circular reasoning.

Our re-submitted paper to the Journal of Geophysical Research entitled “On the Diagnosis of Radiative Feedback in the Presence of Unknown Radiative Forcing” will hopefully lead to a little more diversity being permitted in the global warming debate.

I don’t think the IPCC scientists are as opposed to this as are their self-appointed spokespersons, like Al Gore and numerous environmental writers in the media who get to over-simplify the climate issue without ever being corrected by the IPCC. Natural climate change continues to be the 800 lb gorilla in the room, and I suspect that some within the IPCC are slowly becoming aware of its existence.

Carter poses more than fair questions for proponents of the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis. In fact, I've been waiting for someone to rephrase the question and I'm delighted I stumbled across his piece. It's overdue.

A well-accepted aphorism about science, in the context of difference of opinion between two points of view, is “Madam, you are entitled to your own interpretation, but not to your own facts”.

The world stoker of the fires of global warming alarmism, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), cleverly suborns this dictum in two ways.

First, the IPCC accepts advice from influential groups of scientists who treat the data that underpins their published climate interpretations (collected, of course, using public research funds) as their own private property, and refuse to release it to other scientists.

Thus, confronted in 1996 with a request that he provide a U.S. peer-review referee with a copy of the data that underpinned a research paper that he had submitted, U.K. Hadley Climate Research Centre scientist Tom Wigley responded:

First, it is entirely unnecessary to have original “raw” data in order to review a scientific document. I know of no case at all in which such data were required by or provided to a referee ….. Second, while the data in question [model output from the U.K. Hadley Centre’s climate model] were generated using taxpayer money, this was U.K. taxpayer money. U.S. scientists therefore have no a priori right to such data. Furthermore, these data belong to individual scientists who produced them, not to the IPCC, and it is up to those scientists to decide who they give their data to.

In the face of such attitudes, which treat the established mores of scientific trust and method with contempt, it is scarcely surprising that it took Canadian statistics expert Steve McIntyre many years to get the primary data released that was used by another Hadley Centre scientist, Keith Briffa, in his published tree-ring reconstructions of past temperature from the Urals region, northern hemisphere. When he finally forced the release of the relevant data, McIntyre quickly proceeded to slay a second climate hockey-stick dragon which - like the first such beast fashioned by U.S. scientist Michael Mann, and widely promulgated by the IPCC – turned out to be based on faulty statistical methodology (see summary by Ross McKitrick here: http://www.financialpost.com/opinion...tml?id=2056988 ).

A variant on this, along “the dog ate my homework” path, also involves the Hadley Centre – which is the primary science provider of global temperature statistics to the IPCC. Faced with requests from outside scientists for the provision of the raw temperature data so that scientific audit checks could be undertaken, Hadley’s Phil Jones recently asserted that parts of the raw data used to reconstruct their global temperature curve for the period before about 1980 cannot be provided to outsiders because it has been lost or destroyed. In other words, it is now impossible to conduct an independent audit of the Hadley temperature curve for 1860-2008, on which the IPCC has based an important part of its alarmist global warming advice.

So much for data perversions. The second type of common distortion of normal scientific practice by the IPCC and its supporters concerns not data but hypotheses – which IPCC likes to define in its own way to suit its own ends. This attitude often manifests itself in the fashion expressed in a recent letter sent to me, viz:

Proponents of AGW claim that their theory is supported by peer reviewed literature whilst the case against it is not. This is a very effective argument and, although Solomon's book The Deniers goes some way to counter it, I am not aware of an equally effective refutation. If there is one I would be most grateful if you could point me to it.

In an Australian variation of this, Greg Combet, assistant to climate Minister Penny Wong, earlier this year asserted with blatant inaccuracy that “we use only peer reviewed science and our opposition doesn’t”. Other IPCC sycophants phrase it slightly differently, such as: "if you climate sceptics had a scientific point of view it would have been published in reputable, peer-reviewed journals".

Statements such as these all reflect a fundamental lack of understanding about the way that science works. They also exemplify the way in which climate alarmists always seek to frame the debate in ways that delivers them control, especially by clever choice of language (clean energy; climate change instead of global warming; carbon dioxide is a pollutant instead of a beneficial trace gas, etc.), or, in this case, by framing a hypothesis for testing that suits their political ends rather than Science’s ends.

If you accept at face value questions and comments like the ones enumerated above, you fall into a carefully laid climate alarmist trap. For the question “why are there no papers in peer-reviewed journals that disprove the hypothesis of dangerous human-caused global warming” is predicated, as is all related IPCC writing, on faulty science logic; specifically, it erects a wrong null hypothesis.

Scientists erect hypotheses to test based upon the fundamental science assumption of parsimony, or simplicity, sometimes grandly referred to as Occam’s Razor. That is to say, in seeking to explain matters of observation or experiment, a primary underlying principle is that the simplest explanation be sought; extraneous or complicating factors of interpretation, such as “extraterrestrials did it”, are only invoked when substantive evidence exists for such a complication.

Concerning the climate change that we observe around us today – which, importantly, is occurring at similar rates and magnitudes to that known to have occurred throughout the historical and geological past - the simplest (and therefore null) hypothesis, is that "the climate change observed today is natural unless and until evidence accrues otherwise".

In regard to which, first, no such evidence has emerged. And, second, like any null hypothesis, that about modern climate change is there to be tested, as it has been. There are literally tens of thousands of peer-reviewed papers in major scientific journals that contain observations, data, experiments and theoretical reasoning that are consistent with the null hypothesis, which has therefore yet to be falsified (but, of course, one day might be).

The onus is therefore on Penny Wong and her scientists to provide some “evidence otherwise”. To give a clue how hard that task is, note that since 1988 (when the IPCC was created) western nations have spent more than $100 billion, and employed thousands of scientists, in attempts to measure the human signal in the global temperature record. The search has failed. Though no scientist doubts that humans influence climate at local level - causing both warmings (urban heat island effect) and coolings (land-use changes) - no definitive evidence has yet been discovered that a human influence is measurable, let alone dangerous, at global level. Rather, the human signal is lost in the noise of natural climate variation.

That the correct null hypothesis is the simplest hypothesis is, of course, no reason why other more complex hypotheses cannot be erected for testing. For instance, should you wish to test (as the IPCC should) the idea that "human carbon dioxide emissions are causing dangerous global warming", then there are several ways that that can be done.

The result, long ago, has been the falsification of the dangerous human-caused warming hypothesis. Failed tests include: that global cooling has occurred since 1998 despite an increase in carbon dioxide of 5%; the lack of detailed correlation between the carbon dioxide and temperature records over the last 100 years; consideration of cause and effect timing of past carbon dioxide and temperature levels in ice core records; the absence of the model-predicted temperature hotspot high in the tropical troposphere; the low sensitivity of climate to carbon dioxide forcing as judged against empirical tests; and the demonstrable failure of computer GCMs to predict future climate.

These matters, and that the dangerous warming hypothesis fails numerous empirical tests, have been described in many places. Such writings, whether in refereed journals or not, are simply disparaged or ignored by those who wish to pursue the alarmist IPCC line.

It bears repeating that the onus is on Minister Wong, or her advisory IPCC scientists, to provide any evidence that the null hypothesis regarding modern climate change is false. Because she cannot do so, the clever trick is used of inverting the null hypothesis to demand that climate rationalist scientists demonstrate that human-cased global warming is not occurring.

Perhaps none of this would matter particularly were we dealing only with a squabble amongst scientists. But when ministers in our governments write, as did the Queensland Minister for Climate Change recently, that “The Queensland Government, along with the Australian Government and governments around the world, supports the findings of the IPCC”, it becomes a critical matter of necessity to understand that, in addition to being political in the first place, IPCC advice is also based upon faulty, indeed manipulative, science practice.

As independent scientific advisors to Senator Fielding have shown, the IPCC-derived science advice that the Australian Government is using as the basis for its carbon dioxide tax legislation is utterly flawed. This finding has yet to be rebutted.

Senators who vote for the second version of the misbegotten and misnamed Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme bill will be supporting strongly harmful legislation that is based upon faulty science. Thereby, they will be abandoning their duty of care for the welfare of the Australian people.

DISCLOSURE: Bob Carter is one of the four independent climate scientists who, at Senator Fielding’s request, undertook a due diligence audit of the global warming advice being provided to Climate Minister Penny Wong by her Department. The three other scientists were David Evans, Stewart Franks and Bill Kininmonth.

About.com describes an “urban legend” as an apocryphal (of questionable authenticity), secondhand story, told as true and just plausible enough to be believed, about some horrific…series of events….it’s likely to be framed as a cautionary tale. Whether factual or not, an urban legend is meant to be believed. In lieu of evidence, however, the teller of an urban legend is apt to rely on skillful storytelling and reference to putatively trustworthy sources.

I contend that the belief in human-caused global warming as a dangerous event, either now or in the future, has most of the characteristics of an urban legend. Like other urban legends, it is based upon an element of truth. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas whose concentration in the atmosphere is increasing, and since greenhouse gases warm the lower atmosphere, more CO2 can be expected, at least theoretically, to result in some level of warming.

But skillful storytelling has elevated the danger from a theoretical one to one of near-certainty. The actual scientific basis for the plausible hypothesis that humans could be responsible for most recent warming is contained in the cautious scientific language of many scientific papers. Unfortunately, most of the uncertainties and caveats are then minimized with artfully designed prose contained in the Summary for Policymakers (SP) portion of the report of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This Summary was clearly meant to instill maximum alarm from a minimum amount of direct evidence.

Next, politicians seized upon the SP, further simplifying and extrapolating its claims to the level of a “climate crisis”. Other politicians embellished the tale even more by claiming they “saw” global warming in Greenland as if it was a sighting of Sasquatch, or that they felt it when they fly in airplanes.

Just as the tales of marauding colonies of alligators living in New York City sewers are based upon some kernel of truth, so too is the science behind anthropogenic global warming. But there is a big difference between reports of people finding pet alligators that have escaped their owners, versus city workers having their limbs torn off by roving colonies of subterranean monsters.

In the case of global warming, the “putatively trustworthy sources” would be the consensus of the world’s scientists. The scientific consensus, after all, says that global warming is…is what? Is happening? Is severe? Is manmade? Is going to burn the Earth up if we do not act? It turns out that those who claim consensus either do not explicitly state what that consensus is about, or they make up something that supports their preconceived notions.

If the consensus is that the presence of humans on Earth has some influence on the climate system, then I would have to even include myself in that consensus. After all, the same thing can be said of the presence of trees on Earth, and hopefully we have at least the same rights as trees do. But too often the consensus is some vague, fill-in-the-blank, implied assumption where the definition of “climate change” includes the phrase “humans are evil”.

It is a peculiar development that scientific truth is now decided through voting. A relatively recent survey of climate scientists who do climate research found that 97.4% agreed that humans have a “significant” effect on climate. But the way the survey question was phrased borders on meaninglessness. To a scientist, “significant” often means non-zero. The survey results would have been quite different if the question was, “Do you believe that natural cycles in the climate system have been sufficiently researched to exclude them as a potential cause of most of our recent warming?”

And it is also a good bet that 100% of those scientists surveyed were funded by the government only after they submitted research proposals which implicitly or explicitly stated they believed in anthropogenic global warming to begin with. If you submit a research proposal to look for alternative explanations for global warming (say, natural climate cycles), it is virtually guaranteed you will not get funded. Is it any wonder that scientists who are required to accept the current scientific orthodoxy in order to receive continued funding, then later agree with that orthodoxy when surveyed? Well, duh.

In my experience, the public has the mistaken impression that a lot of climate research has gone into the search for alternative explanations for warming. They are astounded when I tell them that virtually no research has been performed into the possibility that warming is just part of a natural cycle generated within the climate system itself.

Too often the consensus is implied to be that global warming is so serious that we must do something now in the form of public policy to avert global catastrophe. What? You don’t believe that there are alligators in New York City sewer system? How can you be so unconcerned about the welfare of city workers that have to risk their lives by going down there every day? What are you, some kind of Holocaust-denying, Neanderthal flat-Earther?

It makes complete sense that in this modern era of scientific advances and inventions that we would so readily embrace a compelling tale of global catastrophe resulting from our own excesses. It’s not a new genre of storytelling, of course, as there were many B-movies in the 1950s whose horror themes were influenced by scientists’ development of the atomic bomb.

Our modern equivalent is the 2004 movie, “Day After Tomorrow”, in which all kinds of physically impossible climatic events occur in a matter of days. In one scene, super-cold stratospheric air descends to the Earth’s surface, instantly freezing everything in its path. The meteorological truth, however, is just the opposite. If you were to bring stratospheric air down to the surface, heating by compression would make it warmer than the surrounding air, not colder.

I’m sure it is just coincidence that “Day After Tomorrow” was directed by Roland Emmerich, who also directed the 1996 movie “Independence Day,” in which an alien invasion nearly exterminates humanity. After all, what’s the difference? Aliens purposely killing off humans, or humans accidentally killing off humans? Either way, we all die.

But a global warming catastrophe is so much more believable. After all, climate change does happen, right? So why not claim that ALL climate change is now the result of human activity? And while we are at it, let’s re-write climate history so that we get rid of the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice age, with a new ingenious hockey stick-shaped reconstruction of past temperatures that makes it look like climate never changed until the 20th Century? How cool would that be?

The IPCC thought it was way cool…until it was debunked, after which it was quietly downgraded in the IPCC reports from the poster child for anthropogenic global warming, to one possible interpretation of past climate.

And let’s even go further and suppose that the climate system is so precariously balanced that our injection of a little bit of that evil plant food, carbon dioxide, pushes our world over the edge, past all kinds of imaginary tipping points, with the Greenland ice sheet melting away, and swarms of earthquakes being the price of our indiscretions.

In December, hundreds of bureaucrats from around the world will once again assemble, this time in Copenhagen, in their attempts to forge a new international agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as a successor to the Kyoto Protocol. And as has been the case with every other UN meeting of its type, the participants simply assume that the urban legend is true. Indeed, these politicians and governmental representatives need it to be true. Their careers and political power now depend upon it.

And the fact that they hold their meetings in all of the best tourist destinations in the world, enjoying the finest exotic foods, suggests that they do not expect to ever have to be personally inconvenienced by whatever restrictions they try to impose on the rest of humanity.

If you present these people with evidence that the global warming crisis might well be a false alarm, you are rewarded with hostility and insults, rather than expressions of relief. The same can be said for most lay believers of the urban legend. I say “most” because I once encountered a true believer who said he hoped my research into the possibility that climate change is mostly natural will eventually be proved correct.

Unfortunately, just as we are irresistibly drawn to disasters – either real ones on the evening news, or ones we pay to watch in movie theaters – the urban legend of a climate crisis will persist, being believed by those whose politics and worldviews depend upon it. Only when they finally realize what a new treaty will cost them in loss of freedoms and standard of living will those who oppose our continuing use of carbon-based energy begin to lose their religion.

Against the apocalyptic rhetoric... comes a cool-minded new book which unpicks the science underpinning the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's reports. Global Warming, False Alarm by Ralph Alexander, an Australian-born US scientist with a PhD in physics from Oxford, is subtitled ''The bad science behind the United Nations' assertion that man-made CO2 causes global warming". Alexander wrote the book, "because I'm a scientist. Because I'm offended that science has been perverted in the name of global warming."

He became a sceptic when he taught a course on physical science and found the textbook presented the "alarmist line on man-made global warming without question".

"To me that made a mockery of the history of science presented in the course, which featured several examples of how mainstream scientific thinking has been wrong in the past."

The Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change says the earth has effectively developed an allergy to CO2. The effect of a tiny amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is amplified by water vapour and clouds - in a positive feedback loop which enhances the climate's sensitivity to extra CO2 and causes "runaway global warming". That is the big Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change hypothesis.

Alexander explains the three problems with the hypothesis.

First, recent satellite observations show cloud feedback to be a negative loop, that is, clouds reduce global warming, rather than amplify it in a positive feedback loop, as the panel's models predict. Second, the panel has used flawed data. It "stooped to trickery and rewrote history" to make the temperature and CO2 records correlate over the past 2000 years, creating the notorious "hockey stick" graph that wiped out the well-documented Medieval Warm Period (a warm spell about the year 1000) and Little Ice Age (cool period in about 1650). The graph relied on data from a few tree rings to estimate historic temperatures, which have since been shown to be inaccurate. The third problem for the panel hypothesis is that CO2 lags behind temperature in the Ice Age era, which has been explained by the delayed release of stored CO2 from oceans, but the panel model has CO2 and temperature rising together since 1850. "Either temperature and CO2 go up and down at the same time or they don't … You can't have it one way during the ice ages and another way today."

Alexander says data manipulation has been the panel's main tool of deception. For instance, it has ignored the bias in the modern temperature record caused by the "urban heat island effect" that inflates warming near cities.

The panel has also ignored the bias in its temperature data caused by the shutting down of weather stations in cold parts of the world in the 1990s - from about 5000 to 2000 or so - most notably in the former Soviet Union. Again, this artificially increases the recent warming rate. Alexander says the panel has "cherry-picked" 19th century CO2 data to exaggerate the rise in CO2 levels since pre-industrial times, and has trivialised the sun's contribution to the present warming trend.

Don't get him started on computer climate models which he says are "full of unfounded assumptions". He points to the drop in the earth's temperature since 2001 which wasn't predicted by the models.

Ultimately, "trillions of dollars could be wasted to fix a problem that doesn't exist''.

Congrats, Trysail. That was the largest graph you've posted yet. It actually made my browser window three times bigger than my screen. I'm impressed. I also liked the color scheme. It reminded me of my mother's yarn basket, all those years ago.

"Although at first sight it might seem incredible, the Azolla Event alone was probably enough to account for the rapid cooling that brought the Eocene to an end. There is enough carbon locked in the pickled tissue of Azolla at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean to have reduced the CO2 content of the world atmosphere— enough to put a stop to the 'greenhouse world' that had prevailed through the millions of years of the Eocene.

The second leading idea has to do with the chemistry of the air and rocks, and the movement of the landmass of India, which finally made contact with the south coast of Eurasia about 40 million years ago and carried on moving.

But there is one further important complication that was explained in the early twentieth century by the Yugoslav ( now Croatian ) mathematician Milutin Milanković, a bold thinker and one of the few to offer unwavering support to the equally bold Alfred Wegener. It had long been known ( indeed, ever since Johannes Kepler in the early seventeenth century ) that the Earth's orbit around the sun is not circular but elliptical. It was also known that the shape of the orbit changes over periods of about ninety-six thousand years: sometimes the orbit is almost circular, and sometimes it is more elongated. In addition, the Earth is tilted relative to the sun, and the angle of tilt varies periodically. Finally, as the Earth spins, it wobbles, like a spinning top, which is known as precession. These three kinds of change affect the climate, said Milanković, because they affect the Earth's distance from the sun and the angle at which the sun's rays strike the Earth. Add the three effects together, he said, and you are likely to find the Earth will get warmer and then colder at intervals of roughly one hundred thousand years. This effect is superimposed on the general temperature of the Earth, which, as we have seen, is determined largely by the amount of CO2 and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere; by the layout of the continents and hence the flow of ocean currents; and by the amount of ice and hence albedo.

In periods that are generally warm— like the Eocene— the Milanković cycles of relative warmth and relative coolness don't affect things very much. But by the time of the Pleistocene, starting about 2 million years ago, the Earth had been cooling steadily for many millions of years for the reasons we have seen and largely through the rise of the Tibetan plateau. It was so cold during the Pleistocene that the cool phase of the Milanković cycles would have been enough to trigger an Ice Age. Indeed, as the prediction has it, Ice Ages should occur at roughly one hundred thousand year intervals. That means that since the start of the Pleistocene, the world should have experienced about twenty Ice Ages. The geological record says that this is precisely what has happened. The latest Ice Age ended about ten thousand years ago. At present, the world is between Ice Ages, and we will have to wait and see how things will pan out over the next millions of years, as the continents continue to shuffle around and the ocean currents come and go. These things are so complicated that in detail, over time, they are impossible to predict.

But to return to our main theme. Add the rise of Tibet to the death of the Arctic ferns and we have all the mechanisms we need in order to explain why the tropical days of the Eocene came to an end, and why the world has been cooling ever since."

The emergence of a complete fossilized skeleton, originally found in Germany's Messel Pit, that had spent the last thirty-five years in the hands of a private collector into the hands of scientists led to this fascinating account and theory of evolution. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwinius

First there is the argument, commonly used by Al Gore and others, that carbon dioxide forms a layer like a blanket or greenhouse window pane high in the atmosphere which traps long-wave infra-red radiation, thus making the surface of the earth warmer. This is misleading. Certainly carbon dioxide is an infra-red absorber but, like most infra-red absorbing gases, its absorption rate depends on concentration and pressure and is at a maximum at the ground. The atmosphere is a gas, not a solid, and bits of it move up and down, carrying heat as they move. As a meteorological balloon climbs higher in the atmosphere, the measured temperature falls off with increasing height. This phenomenon, referred to as the lapse rate, has been known and described for more than a century. The lapse rate is determined by the thermodynamic properties of the gases that make up the atmosphere and has little to do with radiation. The convection term completely dominates the radiation term in the relevant equation.

i don;t know who this guy is, but he's quite simply wrong in this paragraph. Astonishingly, breath-takingly wrong.

No one believes CO2 forms a layer "like a blanket" around the earth, and I don't know where he gets such nonsense. Greenhouse gases are well-diffused in the atmosphere. The idea of a blanket is absurd.

And yes, IR absorption increases with increasing gas concentration in accordance with Beer's law, but that's just the problem, isn't it? The heat from the land is trapped by the lower atmosphere where gas density is greatest.

Bits of the atmosphere do "move up and down" (duh) and have since the earth had an atmosphere, but there's no reason to think that this will help diffuse excess atmospheric warming. To where is this excess heat going to be convectively dissipated? The stratosphere? So then we have stratospheric warming. Is that an improvement?

The lapse rate he describes is true for the troposphere where we live, but is in fact reversed for the stratosphere, where things get warmer the higher you go, which has everything to do with radiation--solar radiation.

Finally, the lapse rate is not mostly determined by the "thermodynamic properties of gases", but by gas density and thermal diffusion. Since heat is atomic-molecular motion, the more gas you have, the more heat can be stored. A rarer atmosphere contains less heat, i.e. is colder.

This guy maintains he's some expert in fluid dynamics, which I find very hard to believe.

"Although at first sight it might seem incredible,el Pit, that had spent the last thirty-five years in the hands of a private collector into the hands of scientists led to this fascinating account and theory of evolution. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwinius

Dude, I need to score some good shit and it's obvious that you already have a great connection: What about I send ya some bucks and you score some for me....
I only want stuff that has a low carbon footprint and is organically grown and harvested.....

... First there is the argument, commonly used by Al Gore and others, that carbon dioxide forms a layer like a blanket or greenhouse window pane high in the atmosphere which traps long-wave infra-red radiation, thus making the surface of the earth warmer. This is misleading. Certainly carbon dioxide is an infra-red absorber but, like most infra-red absorbing gases, its absorption rate depends on concentration and pressure and is at a maximum at the ground. The atmosphere is a gas, not a solid, and bits of it move up and down, carrying heat as they move. As a meteorological balloon climbs higher in the atmosphere, the measured temperature falls off with increasing height. This phenomenon, referred to as the lapse rate, has been known and described for more than a century. The lapse rate is determined by the thermodynamic properties of the gases that make up the atmosphere and has little to do with radiation. The convection term completely dominates the radiation term in the relevant equation.

Quote:

Originally Posted by dr_mabeuse

First there is the argument, commonly used by Al Gore and others, that carbon dioxide forms a layer like a blanket or greenhouse window pane high in the atmosphere which traps long-wave infra-red radiation, thus making the surface of the earth warmer. This is misleading. Certainly carbon dioxide is an infra-red absorber but, like most infra-red absorbing gases, its absorption rate depends on concentration and pressure and is at a maximum at the ground. The atmosphere is a gas, not a solid, and bits of it move up and down, carrying heat as they move. As a meteorological balloon climbs higher in the atmosphere, the measured temperature falls off with increasing height. This phenomenon, referred to as the lapse rate, has been known and described for more than a century. The lapse rate is determined by the thermodynamic properties of the gases that make up the atmosphere and has little to do with radiation. The convection term completely dominates the radiation term in the relevant equation.

i don;t know who this guy is, but he's quite simply wrong in this paragraph. Astonishingly, breath-takingly wrong.

No one believes CO2 forms a layer "like a blanket" around the earth, and I don't know where he gets such nonsense. Greenhouse gases are well-diffused in the atmosphere. The idea of a blanket is absurd.

And yes, IR absorption increases with increasing gas concentration in accordance with Beer's law, but that's just the problem, isn't it? The heat from the land is trapped by the lower atmosphere where gas density is greatest.

Bits of the atmosphere do "move up and down" (duh) and have since the earth had an atmosphere, but there's no reason to think that this will help diffuse excess atmospheric warming. To where is this excess heat going to be convectively dissipated? The stratosphere? So then we have stratospheric warming. Is that an improvement?

The lapse rate he describes is true for the troposphere where we live, but is in fact reversed for the stratosphere, where things get warmer the higher you go, which has everything to do with radiation--solar radiation.

Finally, the lapse rate is not mostly determined by the "thermodynamic properties of gases", but by gas density and thermal diffusion. Since heat is atomic-molecular motion, the more gas you have, the more heat can be stored. A rarer atmosphere contains less heat, i.e. is colder.

This guy maintains he's some expert in fluid dynamics, which I find very hard to believe.

When you use the quote function, please be so kind as to specify the source of the quote; it saves the trouble of running it to ground.

Whether you will admit it or not, the commonly held perception ( whether accurate or not )— one that has been promulgated by inaccurate reports and certain parties— is that CO2 is not well distributed. That was addressed by the author. Reid specifies the identity of one prominent party guilty of evangelizing that misconception. Like that certain other party, in fairness, it must be remembered that Reid is writing to a general audience and not to an audience of peers. You're nit-picking.

The lapse rate does reverse at the tropopause; however, both the lapse rate and the tropopause are latitude, zone and season dependent and vary widely. Distribution of heat throughout the troposphere occurs through conduction, convection, advection and mechanical mixing. There are diurnal, seasonal and gradient variations that affect both the tropopause and stratopause. Reid's main point— the forest rather than the trees— is that the complexity and dynamism of the system likely defy both comprehension and accurate modelling. The dominating role played by water vapor and, thus, clouds in both reflecting and re-radiating heat is understood but has not been accurately modelled or incorporated in GCMs. All this ignores the potential effects of hundreds ( if not thousands ) of other variables, not least of which is solar radiance. If the system hasn't been accurately modelled, it logically follows that the system is not fully understood. That's Reid's primary— and likely accurate— message.

When you use the quote function, please be so kind as to specify the source of the quote; it saves the trouble of running it to ground.

Whether you will admit it or not, the commonly held perception ( whether accurate or not )— one that has been promulgated by inaccurate reports and certain parties— is that CO2 is not well distributed. That was addressed by the author. Reid specifies the identity of one prominent party guilty of evangelizing that misconception. Like that certain other party, in fairness, it must be remembered that Reid is writing to a general audience and not to an audience of peers. You're nit-picking.

The lapse rate does reverse at the tropopause; however, both the lapse rate and the tropopause are latitude, zone and season dependent and vary widely. Distribution of heat throughout the troposphere occurs through conduction, convection, advection and mechanical mixing. There are diurnal, seasonal and gradient variations that affect both the tropopause and stratopause. Reid's main point— the forest rather than the trees— is that the complexity and dynamism of the system likely defy both comprehension and accurate modelling. The dominanting role played by water vapor and, thus, clouds in both reflecting and re-radiating heat is understood but has not been accurately modelled or incorporated in GCMs. All this ignores the potential effects of hundreds ( if not thousands ) of other variables, not least of which is solar radiance. If the system hasn't been accurately modelled, it logically follows that the system is not fully understood. That's Reid's primary— and likely accurate— message.

Some will no doubt be chary of the document's host. So be it. The IPCC proponents are Dr. Andrew Dlugolecki ( on staff at CRU, http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/people/#Visiting ) and Andrew Torrance. The respondents are Paul Maynard and Christopher Monckton.

Dr. Dlugolecki's criticism of Maynard and Monckton's original article begins on p. 27 and is interlineated with Maynard and Monckton's responses. Commentary and rebuttal of Monckton by Dr. Dlugolecki, with Monckton’s refutation of the rebuttal begins on p. 47.

The table of contents appears on p. 2.

Monckton:

Quote:

There are two reasons why... scientists are not more vocal. First, many institutions are run by people who have decided, on the basis of no credible evidence, that “global warming” – now known as “climate change” – is dangerous and that it is our fault. They brook no argument and are intolerant of contrary research. Secondly, there is now a worldwide funding gravy-train that is spending US$5 billion annually on so-called “climate research”. A scientist wishing to gain access to this cornucopia of cash must look for a “global warming” connection, no matter how tenuous, and must bury any doubts.

“This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the “peer-reviewed literature”. Obviously, they found a solution to that–take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board…What do others think?”

“I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.”“It results from this journal having a number of editors. The responsible one for this is a well-known skeptic in NZ. He has let a few papers through by Michaels and Gray in the past. I’ve had words with Hans von Storch about this, but got nowhere. Another thing to discuss in Nice !”

-Honorary Professor Tom Wigley
University of East Anglia
Climate Research Unit
Hadley Centre

"The aim of CRU is to improve scientific understanding in:
» past climate history and its impact on humanity
» the course and causes of climate change during the present century
» prospects for the future "

Here are prčcis of a small sample of the now widely disseminated emails hacked from the CRU system:

■Phil Jones writes to University of Hull to try to stop sceptic Sonia Boehmer Christiansen using her Hull affiliation. Graham F Haughton of Hull University says its easier to push greenery there now SB-C has retired.(1256765544)
■Michael Mann discusses how to destroy a journal that has published sceptic papers.(1047388489)
■Tim Osborn discusses how data are truncated to stop an apparent cooling trend showing up in the results (0939154709)
■Phil Jones describes the death of sceptic, John Daly, as "cheering news".
■Phil Jones encourages colleagues to delete information subject to FoI request.(1212063122)
■Phil Jones says he has use Mann's "Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series"...to hide the decline". Real Climate says "hiding" was an unfortunate turn of phrase.(0942777075)
■Letter to The Times from climate scientists was drafted with the help of Greenpeace.(0872202064)
■Mann thinks he will contact BBC's Richard Black to find out why another BBC journalist was allowed to publish a vaguely sceptical article.(1255352257)
■Kevin Trenberth says they can't account for the lack of recent warming and that it is a travesty that they can't.(1255352257)
■Tom Wigley says that Lindzen and Choi's paper is crap.(1257532857)
■Tom Wigley says that von Storch is partly to blame for sceptic papers getting published at Climate Research. Says he encourages the publication of crap science. Says they should tell publisher that the journal is being used for misinformation. Says that whether this is true or not doesn't matter. Says they need to get editorial board to resign. Says they need to get rid of von Storch too. (1051190249)
■Ben Santer says (presumably jokingly!) he's "tempted, very tempted, to beat the crap" out of sceptic Pat Michaels. (1255100876)
■Mann tells Jones that it would be nice to '"contain" the putative Medieval Warm Period'. (1054736277)
■Tom Wigley tells Jones that the land warming since 1980 has been twice the ocean warming and that this might be used by sceptics as evidence for urban heat islands.(1257546975)
■Tom Wigley say that Keith Briffa has got himself into a mess over the Yamal chronology (although also says it's insignificant. Wonders how Briffa explains McIntyre's sensitivity test on Yamal and how he explains the use of a less-well replicated chronology over a better one. Wonders if he can. Says data withholding issue is hot potato, since many "good" scientists condemn it.(1254756944)
■Briffa is funding Russian dendro Shiyatov, who asks him to send money to personal bank account so as to avoid tax, thereby retaining money for research.(0826209667)
■Kevin Trenberth says climatologists are nowhere near knowing where the energy goes or what the effect of clouds is. Says nowhere balancing the energy budget. Geoengineering is not possible.(1255523796)
■Mann discusses tactics for screening and delaying postings at Real Climate.(1139521913)
■Tom Wigley discusses how to deal with the advent of FoI law in UK. Jones says use IPR argument to hold onto code. Says data is covered by agreements with outsiders and that CRU will be "hiding behind them".(1106338806)
■Overpeck has no recollection of saying that he wanted to "get rid of the Medieval Warm Period". Thinks he may have been quoted out of context.(1206628118)
■Mann launches RealClimate to the scientific community.(1102687002)
■Santer complaining about FoI requests from McIntyre. Says he expects support of Lawrence Livermore Lab management. Jones says that once support staff at CRU realised the kind of people the scientists were dealing with they became very supportive. Says the VC [vice chancellor] knows what is going on (in one case).(1228330629)
■Rob Wilson concerned about upsetting Mann in a manuscript. Says he needs to word things diplomatically.(1140554230)
■Briffa says he is sick to death of Mann claiming his reconstruction is tropical because it has a few poorly temp sensitive tropical proxies. Says he should regress these against something else like the "increasing trend of self-opinionated verbiage" he produces. Ed Cook agrees with problems.(1024334440)
■Overpeck tells Team to write emails as if they would be made public. Discussion of what to do with McIntyre finding an error in Kaufman paper. Kaufman's admits error and wants to correct. Appears interested in Climate Audit findings.(1252164302)
■Jones calls Pielke Snr a prat.(1233249393)
■Santer says he will no longer publish in Royal Met Soc journals if they enforce intermediate data being made available. Jones has complained to head of Royal Met Soc about new editor of Weather [why?data?] and has threatened to resign from RMS.(1237496573)
■Reaction to McIntyre's 2005 paper in GRL. Mann has challenged GRL editor-in-chief over the publication. Mann is concerned about the connections of the paper's editor James Saiers with U Virginia [does he mean Pat Michaels?]. Tom Wigley says that if Saiers is a sceptic they should go through official GRL channels to get him ousted. (1106322460) [Note to readers - Saiers was subsequently ousted]
■Later on Mann refers to the leak at GRL being plugged.(1132094873)
■Jones says he's found a way around releasing AR4 review comments to David Holland.(1210367056)
■Wigley says Keenan's fraud accusation against Wang is correct. (1188557698)
■Jones calls for Wahl and Ammann to try to change the received date on their alleged refutation of McIntyre [presumably so it can get into AR4](1189722851)
■Mann tells Jones that he is on board and that they are working towards a common goal.(0926010576)
■Mann sends calibration residuals for MBH99 to Osborn. Says they are pretty red, and that they shouldn't be passed on to others, this being the kind of dirty laundry they don't want in the hands of those who might distort it.(1059664704)
■Prior to AR3 Briffa talks of pressure to produce a tidy picture of "apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data". [This appears to be the politics leading the science] Briffa says it was just as warm a thousand years ago.(0938018124)
■Jones says that UK climate organisations are coordinating themselves to resist FoI. They got advice from the Information Commissioner [!](1219239172)
■Mann tells Revkin that McIntyre is not to be trusted.(1254259645)
■Revkin quotes von Storch as saying it is time to toss the Hockey Stick . This back in 2004.(1096382684)
■Funkhouser says he's pulled every trick up his sleeve to milk his Kyrgistan series. Doesn't think it's productive to juggle the chronology statistics any more than he has.(0843161829)
■Wigley discusses fixing an issue with sea surface temperatures in the context of making the results look both warmer but still plausible. (1254108338)
■Jones says he and Kevin will keep some papers out of the next IPCC report.(1089318616)

Quote:

...The UK Government became a strong supporter of climate research in the mid-1980s, following a meeting between Prime Minister Mrs Thatcher and a small number of climate researchers, which included Tom Wigley, the CRU director at the time. This and other meetings eventually led to the setting up of the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research, within the Met Office. At the same time, other governments were also taking notice and wanted more information. As this need was not being met by international scientific bodies and institutions at the time, they set up the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This was under the United Nations Framework (later the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, UNFCCC) and led to assessments being produced in 1990, 1995, 2001 and 2007. CRU staff have been heavily involved in all four assessments, probably more than anywhere else relative to the size of an institution (see IPCC AR4 Authors). The most recent IPCC assessment report (in 2007) has stated - "The warming of the climate system is unequivocal".

In the late 1980s, CRU started to explore the pattern correlation "fingerprint" method of detection, a technique to assess how the observed pattern of climate change matches that which can be attributed to particular causes. This work culminated in 1995, when a team of researchers from American institutes and from CRU, using the computer simulations of climate change caused by increasing emissions of carbon dioxide, the most important greenhouse gas, and sulphate aerosols (developed by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, USA), was able to detect the effects of these climate forcing factors in the climate observations. The results were in stark contrast to the consensus view expressed by IPCC in 1990, when it was stated that the effect of increased carbon dioxide concentrations could not yet be identified in the observed record. This work played a critical role in the conclusion reached by the 1995 assessment of the IPCC that "the balance of evidence suggests that there has been a discernible human influence on global climate". Subsequent IPCC reports have strengthened these statements (in 2001: "there is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities" and in 2007: "most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations") and led most governments, industries, multi-national companies and the majority of the public to accept that the climate is warming, and humans are part of the cause. Accepting the evidence is one thing, but not all governments appreciate the full scale of the problem yet.

CRU has also played a major role in attempts to predict future anthropogenic climate change, and some of its consequences. In the late 1970s, rapid advances were being made elsewhere in atmospheric climate modelling (using Global Climate Models, GCMs), but it would be many years before these could be coupled to ocean GCMs. CRU pioneered simpler models (Energy Balance Models, EBMs) and, unlike the computer-intensive GCMs, they allowed the consideration of the consequences of a wider range of future emission scenarios and an assessment of the uncertainties due to parameters such as the climate sensitivity. Even though the GCMs have now improved in scope and speed, these simpler models are still valuable for interpolating between, or extrapolating beyond, the results of GCMs. CRU's work with these models led directly to the global-mean temperature projections given by the IPCC in 1990 and to corresponding projections of sea-level rise.

In 1992, CRU conducted a comprehensive integrated assessment of the climate projection problem, linking an EBM (now called MAGICC) and ice-melt models with models for translating greenhouse gas emissions to atmospheric concentrations and sulphur dioxide emissions that could be used to drive MAGICC. This work by CRU was the first attempt to consider the full spectrum of anthropogenic influences on climate in an internally consistent way. This methodology has improved, but the same basic approach is still used and remains a vital tool used by the IPCC in the construction of future climate projections, as it is able to cover a much wider range of the uncertainties in greenhouse gas and aerosol scenarios than the more computationally expensive GCMs. The dramatic increases in computer power over the last 30 years have mainly been used to increase the spatial and vertical resolution of GCMs and to simulate many more aspects of the climate system (e.g., interactive atmospheric chemistry, interactive biosphere, runoff routing). Earth System Models or Global Environmental Models (as GCMs are sometimes called) require the largest and fastest computers in the world. These resources are best allocated to improving the comprehensiveness of the models, as opposed to running extensive scenario combinations for IPCC reports every few years. MAGICC and other similar developments around the world, therefore, continue to fill an important niche.

CRU researchers have also pioneered several approaches to the construction of regional climate change scenarios which can be used in climate impact assessments, environmental planning and climate policy debates. These approaches included some of the first analogue scenarios and the development of techniques for linking results from simple and complex climate models. In the 1990s, CRU incorporated model-based scenarios into integrated assessments of climate change undertaken for the UK, European and US governments. This work has led to the creation of several scenario software applications which are widely used by the research communities. This scenario work has also been incorporated into IPCC reports.

Much scenario work is dependent on translating the broad-scale climate information produced by GCMs and their regional counterparts (RCMs) to a space- or time-scale which is of relevance for impact assessment (e.g., catchment or station scale and day-to-day weather). CRU pioneered some of the first work on this crucial issue of "downscaling", both from a statistical (using observed relationships between space- and time-scales) and dynamical (directly through RCMs) approach and was among the first to thoroughly compare the two approaches. Scenarios are becoming more and more detailed, and to incorporate all aspects of uncertainty (emissions, model parameterization, etc.) and different modelling frameworks (also called structural uncertainty), the next, emerging, generation is largely based on probability density functions. The UK is leading the way in these endeavours, but comprehensive education of the impacts community in the use and interpretation of probability-based information is required. CRU is taking the lead here with probability-based projections based on adapting weather generators to provide daily data (see CRANIUM project) within the next set of national scenarios (UKCIP08).

This field has also led to much work in the climate impacts field, which has become gradually more extensive to support the discussion of mitigation and adaptation options. This moved the agenda from the scientific determination of the global warming problem to how to solve the problem. In the late 1990s, the UK Research Councils recognized the need for a centre to address these issues. CRU, ENV and other groups across the UK were successful with their bid, and the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research was born in 2000. The Tyndall Centre focuses on solutions to the problem of climate change, while CRU continues to work on all aspects of climate science. CRU and Tyndall work together on some projects, but their specific aims and agendas are different. The growing practical applicability of CRU work is nonetheless reflected in the increasing range of academic users, stakeholders, decision makers and professional bodies with which CRU is involved, as well as the range of impacts sectors covered. The latter include agriculture, water, health, energy and, most recently, the built environment. These aspects of CRU work in the UK are also facilitated by strong links with the UK Climate Impacts Programme (UKCIP) which was set up in 1997 - based at the University of Oxford.

From 1992-2007, CRU co-ordinated or played a key role in the Climate Impacts LINK Project, whose purpose is to disseminate the results of current climate simulations and future climate projections from the Hadley Centre's computer models to research groups in the UK and overseas, who are concerned with attempting to assess the impacts of climate change. The objectives of the LINK project are to ensure that all such groups are aware of the nature of such results, that they cannot be used uncritically, and, most importantly, that the same standard climate data sets are used as input to the many impact assessments that have been undertaken. This latter objective has helped to make the results of different impact assessments comparable, enabling a large part of the full range of potential uncertainties to be incorporated into the UKCIP08 framework of probability-based projections. A measure of the success of the LINK project in making consistent sets of past and future climate information available to non-experts, together with appropriate education and advice, is that the majority of studies to date addressing impacts of climate change around the world have used data from Hadley Centre climate models. The LINK project became the mould for data dissemination from climate modelling centres and it eventually led to the establishment by the IPCC of the Data Distribution Centre (DDC). Both projects are now led by the British Atmospheric Data Centre (BADC), but CRU is still involved.

A main thrust of the Unit's research programme since the early 1980s has, therefore, been global warming: the human contribution, the future climate response, and possible impacts of future climate change, with an increasing emphasis on adaptation to these impacts. But this was not to the exclusion of other research, much of it of commercial relevance. A few examples follow. From the late 1970s through to the collapse of oil prices in the late 1980s, CRU received a series of contracts from BP to provide data and advice concerning their exploration operations in the Arctic marginal seas. Working closely with BP's Cold Regions Group, CRU staff developed a set of detailed sea-ice atlases, covering estimates of data quality and climate variability as well as standard climatological means, and a series of reports on specific issues, such as navigation capabilities through the Canadian Archipelago. Assessment of the wind energy resource over the UK led to the development of predictive schemes to assess the potential power production at candidate wind turbine sites. Research on predicting canopy wetness as a vector for disease in cocoa plantations has been of special interest to Brazilian cocoa producers. Advice from CRU has been sought on far-future climate states in relation to the long-term safety of low- and intermediate-level radioactive waste storage sites. On shorter-term timescales, work on extreme events with implications for nuclear power station operation has been undertaken. Perhaps, not surprisingly, the insurance and re-insurance industries have been a regular sponsor of research with studies evaluating the risk of hurricane landfall on the Gulf and Atlantic coasts of the US, the impacts of severe storms in Europe and the characteristic of the typhoon risk over Japan. Former public utilities, such as the Central Electricity Generating Board (and latterly National Power) commissioned work from CRU on acid rain, wind energy, and surface ozone. Work has also been undertaken for Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace.

Returning to the beginning, Hubert Lamb's work during the early 1970s on historic North Sea storm surges contributed in no small part to the implementation of plans for a flood barrier on the River Thames, drawn up after the disastrous East Coast floods of 1953. The number of times the Thames Barrier has been closed since its completion - increasingly so in recent years because, as Lamb predicted, sea level has risen - testifies to the value of this research. Hubert Lamb's other ground-breaking research (much of it summarised in the two volumes of his landmark book Climate: Present, Past and Future, which appeared during the 1970s) is still widely cited in science articles today.

Today, CRU is still dependent upon research grant income to maintain the size and breadth of our research and student communities. The European Commission of the European Union (EU) provides the largest fraction of our research income under the Environment and Climate Change Programme. Since the mid-1990s, CRU has co-ordinated 9 EU research projects and been a partner on 16 others within the 4th, 5th and 6th Framework Programmes. Although EU funding is very important, we also endeavour to maintain the diverse pattern of funding reflected by the research described in this "history of CRU" and in the list of Acknowledgements below.

Since its inception in 1972, over 40 students have been awarded PhD degrees, and the rate of awards has dramatically grown in the last 10 years. Today, CRU has a thriving student community of 11 PhD students (July 2007). CRU also runs a NERC-recognized Master of Science degree programme on Climate Change. For the past 10 years, this degree attracted between 6 and 10 students per year, but the last two academic years (2005/06 to 2006/07) have seen an upsurge to 22 students per year. This is a strong endorsement of the growing importance of the subject and of our reputation.

A number of CRU staff have been awarded medals, certificates or fellowships from the Royal Meteorological Society, the European Geosciences Union, the American Meteorological Society, the American Geophysical Union and the Leverhulme Trust. Over the last 35 years also, several staff have been on the editorial boards of a number of major climatic journals ( International Journal of Climatology, Climatic Change, Weather, Atmospheric Science Letters, Journal of Climate, The Holocene, Boreas, Climate Research, Theoretical and Applied Climatology ).

A research unit this size doesn't run itself. The Directors and Research Staff over the years have been supported by a number of administrative, secretarial and other support staff, although this number has fallen in the last decade due to changes in working practices, organisation and information technology. This technology, however, doesn't manage or maintain itself. CRU foresaw at the birth of personal computers that a permanent staff member was vital to keep everyone going and keep them up-to-date. In the early days this was difficult to justify on research grants, but Mike Salmon is now on the ENV support staff and manages CRU computers and in a large part of ENV. He also manages our web site - 'which as ever reigns supreme' according to the New Scientist.

Acknowledgements
This list is not fully exhaustive, but we would like to acknowledge the support of the following funders (in alphabetical order):
British Council, British Petroleum, Broom's Barn Sugar Beet Research Centre, Central Electricity Generating Board, Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science (CEFAS), Commercial Union, Commission of European Communities (CEC, often referred to now as EU), Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils (CCLRC), Department of Energy, Department of the Environment (DETR, now DEFRA), Department of Health, Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), Eastern Electricity, Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), Environment Agency, Forestry Commission, Greenpeace International, International Institute of Environmental Development (IIED), Irish Electricity Supply Board, KFA Germany, Leverhulme Trust, Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF), National Power, National Rivers Authority, Natural Environmental Research Council (NERC), Norwich Union, Nuclear Installations Inspectorate, Overseas Development Administration (ODA), Reinsurance Underwriters and Syndicates, Royal Society, Scientific Consultants, Science and Engineering Research Council (SERC), Scottish and Northern Ireland Forum for Environmental Research, Shell, Stockholm Environment Agency, Sultanate of Oman, Tate and Lyle, UK Met. Office, UK Nirex Ltd., United Nations Environment Plan (UNEP), United States Department of Energy, United States Environmental Protection Agency, Wolfson Foundation and the World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF).

At the risk of overload, here are some notes of mine on the recent lack of warming. I look at this in two ways. The first is to look at the difference between the observed and expected anthropogenic trend relative to the pdf for unforced variability. The second is to remove ENSO, volcanoes and TSI variations from the observed data.

Both methods show that what we are seeing is not unusual. The second
method leaves a significant warming over the past decade.

These sums complement Kevin's energy work.

Kevin says ... "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't". I do not agree with this.

Tom.

+++++++++++++++++++++++

Kevin Trenberth wrote:
> Hi all
> Well I have my own article on where the heck is global warming? We are
> asking that here in Boulder where we have broken records the past two
> days for the coldest days on record. We had 4 inches of snow. The high
> the last 2 days was below 30F and the normal is 69F, and it smashed the
> previous records for these days by 10F. The low was about 18F and also
> a record low, well below the previous record low. This is January
> weather (see the Rockies baseball playoff game was canceled on saturday
> and then played last night in below freezing weather).
>
> Trenberth, K. E., 2009: An imperative for climate change planning:
> tracking Earth's global energy. /Current Opinion in Environmental
> Sustainability/, *1*, 19-27, doi:10.1016/j.cosust.2009.06.001. [PDF]
> <http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/Trenberth/trenberth.papers/EnergyDiagnostics09final.pdf>
> (A PDF of the published version can be obtained from the author.)
>
> The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment
> and it is a travesty that we can't. The CERES data published in the
> August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more
> warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.
>
> That said there is a LOT of nonsense about the PDO. People like CPC are
> tracking PDO on a monthly basis but it is highly correlated with ENSO.
> Most of what they are seeing is the change in ENSO not real PDO. It
> surely isn't decadal. The PDO is already reversing with the switch to
> El Nino. The PDO index became positive in September for first time
> since Sept 2007. see
> http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/product...ng_current.ppt
>
> Kevin
>
> Michael Mann wrote:
>> extremely disappointing to see something like this appear on BBC. its
>> particularly odd, since climate is usually Richard Black's beat at BBC
>> (and he does a great job). from what I can tell, this guy was formerly
>> a weather person at the Met Office.
>>
>> We may do something about this on RealClimate, but meanwhile it might
>> be appropriate for the Met Office to have a say about this, I might
>> ask Richard Black what's up here?
>>
>> mike
>>
>> On Oct 12, 2009, at 2:32 AM, Stephen H Schneider wrote:
>>
>>> Hi all. Any of you want to explain decadal natural variability and
>>> signal to noise and sampling errors to this new "IPCC Lead Author"
>>> from the BBC? As we enter an El Nino year and as soon, as the
>>> sunspots get over their temporary--presumed--vacation worth a few
>>> tenths of a Watt per meter squared reduced forcing, there will likely
>>> be another dramatic upward spike like 1xxx xxxx xxxx. I heard
>>> someone--Mike Schlesinger maybe??--was willing to bet alot of money
>>> on it happening in next 5 years?? Meanwhile the past 10 years of
>>> global mean temperature trend stasis still saw what, 9 of the warmest
>>> in reconstructed 1000 year record and Greenland and the sea ice of
>>> the North in big retreat?? Some of you observational folks probably
>>> do need to straighten this out as my student suggests below. Such
>>> "fun", Cheers, Steve
>>>
>>>
>>> Stephen H. Schneider
>>> Melvin and Joan Lane Professor for Interdisciplinary Environmental
>>> Studies,
>>> Professor, Department of Biology and
>>> Senior Fellow, Woods Institute for the Environment
>>> Mailing address:
>>> Yang & Yamazaki Environment & Energy Building - MC 4205
>>> 473 Via Ortega
>>> Ph: xxx xxxx xxxx
>>> F: xxx xxxx xxxx
>>> Websites: climatechange.net
>>> patientfromhell.org
>>>
>>>
>>> ----- Forwarded Message -----
>>> From: "Narasimha D. Rao" <ndrao@xxxxxxxxx.xxx <mailto:ndrao@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>>
>>> To: "Stephen H Schneider" <shs@xxxxxxxxx.xxx <mailto:shs@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>>
>>> Sent: Sunday, October 11, 2009 10:25:53 AM GMT -08:00 US/Canada Pacific
>>> Subject: BBC U-turn on climate
>>>
>>> Steve,
>>> You may be aware of this already. Paul Hudson, BBC's reporter on
>>> climate change, on Friday wrote that there's been no warming since
>>> 1998, and that pacific oscillations will force cooling for the next
>>> xxx xxxx xxxxyears. It is not outrageously biased in presentation as are
>>> other skeptics' views.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8299079.stm
>>> http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/da...limate-change/
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> BBC has significant influence on public opinion outside the US.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Do you think this merits an op-ed response in the BBC from a scientist?
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Narasimha
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> -------------------------------
>>> PhD Candidate,
>>> Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources (E-IPER)
>>> Stanford University
>>> Tel: xxx xxxx xxxx
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>> --
>> Michael E. Mann
>> Professor
>> Director, Earth System Science Center (ESSC)
>>
>> Department of Meteorology Phone: (8xxx xxxx xxxx
>> 503 Walker Building FAX: (8xxx xxxx xxxx
>> The Pennsylvania State University email: mann@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
>> <mailto:mann@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
>> University Park, PA 16xxx xxxx xxxx
>>
>> website: http://www.meteo.psu.edu/~mann/Mann/index.html
>> <http://www.meteo.psu.edu/%7Emann/Mann/index.html>
>> "Dire Predictions" book site:
>> http://www.essc.psu.edu/essc_web/new...ons/index.html
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
> --
> ****************
> Kevin E. Trenberth e-mail: trenbert@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
> Climate Analysis Section, www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/trenbert.html
> NCAR
> P. O. Box 3000, (3xxx xxxx xxxx
> Boulder, CO 80xxx xxxx xxxx (3xxx xxxx xxxx(fax)
>
> Street address: 1850 Table Mesa Drive, Boulder, CO 80305
>

MikeHere are some of the issues as I see them:
Saying it is natural variability is not an explanation. What are the physical processes?
Where did the heat go? We know there is a build up of ocean heat prior to El Nino, and a discharge (and sfc T warming) during late stages of El Nino, but is the observing system sufficient to track it? Quite aside from the changes in the ocean, we know there are major changes in the storm tracks and teleconnections with ENSO, and there is a LOT more rain on land during La Nina (more drought in El Nino), so how does the albedo change overall
(changes in cloud)? At the very least the extra rain on land means a lot more heat goes into evaporation rather than raising temperatures, and so that keeps land temps down: and should generate cloud. But the resulting evaporative cooling means the heat goes into atmosphere and should be radiated to space: so we should be able to track it with CERES
data. The CERES data are unfortunately wanting and so too are the cloud data. The ocean data are also lacking although some of that may be related to the ocean current changes and burying heat at depth where it is not picked up. If it is sequestered at depth then it comes back to haunt us later and so we should know about it.
Kevin
Michael Mann wrote:

Kevin, that's an interesting point. As the plot from Gavin I sent shows, we can easily account for the observed surface cooling in terms of the natural variability seen in the CMIP3 ensemble (i.e. the observed cold dip falls well within it). So in that sense, we can "explain" it. But this raises the interesting question, is there something going on here w/ the energy & radiation budget which is inconsistent with the modes of internal variability that leads to similar temporary cooling periods within the models.
I'm not sure that this has been addressed--has it?

m

On Oct 14, 2009, at 10:17 AM, Kevin Trenberth wrote:

Hi Tom
How come you do not agree with a statement that says we are no where close to knowing where energy is going or whether clouds are changing to make the planet brighter. We are not close to balancing the energy budget. The fact that we can not account for what is happening in the climate system makes any consideration of geoengineering quite hopeless as we will never be able to tell if it is successful or not! It is a travesty!
Kevin
Tom Wigley wrote:

Dear all,

At the risk of overload, here are some notes of mine on the recent
lack of warming. I look at this in two ways. The first is to look at
the difference between the observed and expected anthropogenic trend relative to the pdf for unforced variability. The second is to remove ENSO, volcanoes and TSI variations from the observed data.

Both methods show that what we are seeing is not unusual. The second

method leaves a significant warming over the past decade.

These sums complement Kevin's energy work.

Kevin says ... "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment
and it is a travesty that we can't". I do not

agree with this.

Tom.

+++++++++++++++++++++++

Kevin Trenberth wrote:

Hi all

Well I have my own article on where the heck is global warming? We are asking that here in Boulder where we have broken records the past two days for the coldest days on record. We had 4 inches of snow. The high the last 2 days was below 30F and the normal is 69F, and it smashed the previous records for these days by 10F. The low was about 18F and also a record low, well below the previous record low. This is January weather (see the Rockies baseball playoff game was canceled on saturday and then played last night in below freezing weather).

Trenberth, K. E., 2009: An imperative for climate change planning: tracking Earth's
global energy. /Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability/, *1*, 19-27,
doi:10.1016/j.cosust.2009.06.001. [PDF]
<[1]http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/Trenberth/trenberth.papers/EnergyDiagnostics09final.pdf>
(A PDF of the published version can be obtained from the author.)

The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.

That said there is a LOT of nonsense about the PDO. People like CPC are tracking PDO on a monthly basis but it is highly correlated with ENSO. Most of what they are seeing is the change in ENSO not real PDO. It surely isn't decadal. The PDO is already reversing with the switch to El Nino. The PDO index became positive in September for first time since Sept 2007. see
[2]http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/GODAS/ocean_briefing_gif/global_ocean_monitorin
g_current.ppt

Kevin

Michael Mann wrote:

extremely disappointing to see something like this appear on BBC. its particularly odd,
since climate is usually Richard Black's beat at BBC (and he does a great job). from
what I can tell, this guy was formerly a weather person at the Met Office.

We may do something about this on RealClimate, but meanwhile it might be appropriate for
the Met Office to have a say about this, I might ask Richard Black what's up here?

mike

On Oct 12, 2009, at 2:32 AM, Stephen H Schneider wrote:

Hi all. Any of you want to explain decadal natural variability and signal to noise and
sampling errors to this new "IPCC Lead Author" from the BBC? As we enter an El Nino
year and as soon, as the sunspots get over their temporary--presumed--vacation worth a
few tenths of a Watt per meter squared reduced forcing, there will likely be another
dramatic upward spike like 1xxx xxxx xxxx. I heard someone--Mike Schlesinger maybe??--was
willing to bet alot of money on it happening in next 5 years?? Meanwhile the past 10
years of global mean temperature trend stasis still saw what, 9 of the warmest in
reconstructed 1000 year record and Greenland and the sea ice of the North in big
retreat?? Some of you observational folks probably do need to straighten this out as my
student suggests below. Such "fun", Cheers, Steve

You may be aware of this already. Paul Hudson, BBC's reporter on climate change, on
Friday wrote that there's been no warming since 1998, and that pacific oscillations will
force cooling for the next xxx xxxx xxxxyears. It is not outrageously biased in presentation as
are other skeptics' views.

"In September, the World Meteorological Organization, an agency of the United Nations, anointed television weather presenters as climate emissaries, highlighting the role they could play in communicating evidence and information about global warming directly to viewers."

Some of the world’s top climate scientists have been accused of manipulating data on global warming after hundreds of private emails were stolen by hackers and published online.

The material was taken from servers at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit – a world-renowned climate change research centre – before it was published on websites run by climate change skeptics. It has been claimed that the emails show that scientists manipulated data to bolster their argument that global warming is genuine and is being caused by human actions.

Until comparatively recently, I was fairly neutral about this climate change stuff. What has put me right off it is the way various politicians have hoisted the matter with no thought to the consequences.
Science has not, as far as I can see, made it's mind up about the how or why, let alone the when. We see conflicting reports almost daily in the press and there is a remarkable paucity of trust-worthy folks to explain it (ignorance does not necessarily mean stupidity).

What prompted my change of heart was reading a book by Michael Chrighton called "State of Fear". Ignoring the general (fiction) story, the author quotes chapter & verse on just about any matter raised in this climate debate. He shows the published graphs of this and that city, but nowhere can it be said that there is a real consensus, except that "it's not good."

For my part, I think we should cease & desist chucking any or all crap into the atmosphere before we know what it's going to do.
Saving the Electricity Bill is logical, so low-energy lamps are logical.
They are not necessarily mandatory.

We've written about the leaked emails and other documents from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Center here, here and here. Another intensely interesting email thread, which doesn't seem to have gotten much notice, relates to the fact that the last decade, contrary to the alarmists' predictions, has tended to get cooler, not warmer.

At the end of 2008, the scientists at East Anglia predicted that 2009 would be one of the warmest years on record:

On December 30, climate scientists from the UK Met Office and the University of East Anglia projected 2009 will be one of the top five warmest years on record. Average global temperatures for 2009 are predicted to be 0.4∞C above the 1961-1990 average of 14 ∫ C. A multiyear forecast using a Met Office climate model indicates a rapid return of global temperature to the long-term warming trend, with an increasing probability of record temperatures after 2009.

We know now that the alarmists' prediction for 2009 didn't come true. What's interesting is that in January of this year, another climate alarmist named Mike MacCracken wrote to Phil Jones and another East Anglia climatologist, saying that their predicted warming may not occur:

Your prediction for 2009 is very interesting...and I would expect the analysis you have done is correct. But, I have one nagging question, and that is how much SO2/sulfate is being generated by the rising emissions from China and India.... While I understand there are efforts to get much better inventories of CO2 emissions from these nations, when I asked a US EPA representative if their efforts were going to also inventory SO2 emissions (amount and height of emission), I was told they were not. So, it seems, the scientific uncertainty generated by not having good data from the mid-20th century is going to be repeated in the early 21st century (satellites may help on optical depth, but it would really help to know what is being emitted).

That there is a large potential for a cooling influence is sort of evident in the IPCC figure about the present sulfate distribution--most is right over China, for example, suggesting that the emissions are near the surface--something also that is, so to speak, 'clear' from the very poor visibility and air quality in China and India. So, the quick, fast, cheap fix is to put the SO2 out through tall stacks. The cooling potential also seems quite large as the plume would go out over the ocean with its low albedo--and right where a lot of water vapor is evaporated, so maybe one pulls down the water vapor feedback a little and this amplifies the sulfate cooling influence.

Now, I am not at all sure that having more tropospheric sulfate would be a bad idea as it would limit warming--I even have started suggesting that the least expensive and quickest geoengineering approach to limit global warming would be to enhance the sulfate loading.... Sure, a bit more acid deposition, but it is not harmful over the ocean.... Indeed, rather than go to stratospheric sulfate injections, I am leaning toward tropospheric, but only during periods when trajectories are heading over ocean and material won't get rained out for 10 days or so.

In any case, if the sulfate hypothesis is right, then your prediction of warming might end up being wrong. I think we have been too readily explaining the slow changes over past decade as a result of variability--that explanation is wearing thin. I would just suggest, as a backup to your prediction, that you also do some checking on the sulfate issue, just so you might have a quantified explanation in case the prediction is wrong.

Otherwise, the Skeptics will be all over us--the world is really cooling, the models are no good, etc.

Sulphur dioxide, like carbon dioxide, is emitted as a result of industrial activity. Unlike carbon dioxide, it is actually a pollutant. But whereas carbon dioxide tends to warm, sulphur dioxide tends to cool, and MacCracken suggests that SO2 emissions from China and India may well be offsetting the temperature impact of CO2. The net effect of human activity, therefore, may be much closer to neutral than the alarmists have been claiming.

How did the British scientists, whose careers are committed to the proposition that human activity is causing catastrophic warming of the globe, respond? Surprisingly, Tim Johns reacted with insouciance:

Mike McCracken makes a fair point. I am no expert on the observational uncertainties in tropospheric SO2 emissions over the recent past, but it is certainly the case that the SRES A1B scenario (for instance) as seen by different integrated assessment models shows a range of possibilities. In fact this has been an issue for us in the ENSEMBLES project, since we have been running models with a new mitigation/stabilization scenario "E1" (that has large emissions reductions relative to an A1B baseline, generated using the IMAGE IAM) and comparing it with A1B (the AR4 marker version, generated by a different IAM). The latter has a possibly unrealistic secondary SO2 emissions peak in the early 21st C - not present in the IMAGE E1 scenario, which has a steady decline in SO2 emissions from 2000. The A1B scenario as generated with IMAGE also show a decline rather than the secondary emissions peak, but I can't say for sure which is most likely to be "realistic".

The impact of the two alternative SO2 emissions trajectories is quite marked though in terms of global temperature response in the first few decades of the 21st C (at least in our HadGEM2-AO simulations, reflecting actual aerosol forcings in that model plus some divergence in GHG forcing). Ironically, the E1-IMAGE scenario runs, although much cooler in the long term of course, are considerably warmer than A1B-AR4 for several decades! Also - relevant to your statement - A1B-AR4 runs show potential for a distinct lack of warming in the early 21st C, which I'm sure skeptics would love to see replicated in the real world... (See the attached plot for illustration but please don't circulate this any further as these are results in progress, not yet shared with other ENSEMBLES partners let alone published). We think the different short term warming responses are largely attributable to the different SO2 emissions trajectories.

So far we've run two realisations of both the E1-IMAGE and A1B-AR4 scenarios with HadGEM2-AO, and other partners in ENSEMBLES are doing similar runs using other GCMs. Results will start to be analysed in a multi-model way in the next few months. CMIP5 (AR5) prescribes similar kinds of experiments, but the implementation details might well be different from ENSEMBLES experiments wrt scenarios and their SO2 emissions trajectories (I haven't studied the CMIP5 experiment fine print to that extent).

Cheers,
Tim

Got that? Here is a translation: assumptions about SO2 emissions do have a "quite marked...impact" on global temperatures under the warmists' various models. What impact they have varies from model to model. Which model is correct (if any)? Who knows? But as a result of increased SO2 in the atmosphere, there is "potential for a distinct lack of warming in the early 21st C."

That must come as a great relief, since everyone involved in this exchange has been telling the public that global warming is an imminent catastrophe. But no! The prospect of a "distinct lack of warming in the early 21st C[entury]" is bad, because "skeptics" would "love" it!

Phil Jones, Director of the Climate Research Unit, now weighs in. Does he welcome the idea that, contrary to his own predictions, there may be little or no warming in coming decades? No!

Tim, Chris,

I hope you're not right about the lack of warming lasting till about 2020. I'd rather hoped to see the earlier Met Office press release with Doug's paper that said something like -half the years to 2014 would exceed the warmest year currently on record, 1998!

Still a way to go before 2014.

I seem to be getting an email a week from skeptics saying where's the warming gone. I know the warming is on the decadal scale, but it would be nice to wear their smug grins away.

Better that the Earth experience the cataclysm of global warming than that the skeptics be proved right? It makes one wonder how seriously Jones believes in the catastrophe of global warming. Jones then frets about whether the weather is really as cool as the weathermen are saying:

Chris - I presume the Met Office continually monitor the weather forecasts. Maybe because I'm in my 50s, but the language used in the forecasts seems a bit over the top re the cold. Where I've been for the last 20 days (in Norfolk) it doesn't seem to have been as cold as the forecasts.

So the very climate scientists who keep saying that global warming will be an unparalleled disaster for humanity are telling the Earth: Heat up, damn it!

But let's go back to the main point. Apparently the alarmist climatologists acknowledge that SO2, frequently emitted in conjunction with CO2, nullifies, wholly or in part, any warming tendency associated with the CO2. What is the net effect? This is, obviously, an empirical, quantitative question. But these scientists can't answer it, not only because each of their models gives a different result, but because they have no idea how much SO2 is being emitted by the main countries that produce that pollutant, India and China. Having no idea what the facts are, their models are useless. It does appear, however, that one obvious alternative to impoverishing humanity in a most-likely-futile effort to stave off global warming would be emitting a whole lot of SO2 over the ocean, and continuing those emissions indefinitely rather than banning them as is currently contemplated by the warmists' models.

Climate science is in its infancy, and every proposition is controversial. What climate scientists like those at East Anglia don't know dwarfs what they do know. They can produce a model for every occasion, but are the models any good? If so, which one? One thing we know for sure is that they don't generate reliable predictions. In every scientific field other than global warming, a scientific hypothesis that generates false predictions is considered disproved. When it comes to global warming, however, there is no such thing as falsification. Which is the ultimate evidence that the alarmist scientists are engaged in a political enterprise, not a scientific one.